It was disconcerting – though this was what he had wanted – to hear how inhibition made her voice soft and kept her face controlled. The words she used were the same, though. He had heard them a thousand times before. ‘If you leave me, I’ll follow you. I’ll go to your office and tell them all about it. I’ll sit on your doorstep. I won’t be abandoned. I’d rather die. I won’t be a divorced woman just because you’ve got tired of me.’

‘If you go on like this,’ he said thickly, ‘you’ll find yourself a widow. Will you like that?’

Had they been alone, she would have screamed the affirmative at him. Because they weren’t, she gave him a thin, sharp and concentrated smile, a smile which an observer might have taken for amusement at some married couple’s private joke. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I’d like to be a widow, your widow. Drink yourself to death, why don’t you? That’s what you have to do if you want to be rid of me.’

The waitress came to their table. James ordered a double brandy and ‘coffee for my wife.’ He knew he would never be rid of her. He wasn’t the sort of man who can stand public disruption of his life, scenes at work, molestation, the involvement of friends and employers. It must be, he knew, an amicable split or none at all. And since she would never see reason, never understand or forgive, he must soldier on. With the help of this, he thought, as the brandy spread its dim cloudy euphoria through his brain. He drained his glass quickly, muttered an ‘excuse me’ to her for the benefit of listeners, and left the dining room.

Nina returned to the television lounge. There was a play on whose theme was a marital situation that almost paralleled her own. The old ladies with their knitting and the old men with their after-dinner cigars watched it apathetically. She thought she might take the car and go somewhere for a drive. It didn’t much matter where, anywhere would do that was far enough from this hotel and James and that cathedral clock whose chimes split the hours into fifteen minute segments with long brazen peals. There must be somewhere in this town where one could get a decent cup of coffee, some cinema maybe where they weren’t showing a film about marriage or what people, she thought shudderingly, called sexual relationships. She went upstairs to get the car keys and some money.

James was fast asleep. He had taken off his tie and his shoes, but otherwise he was fully dressed, lying on his back and snoring. Stupid of him not to get under the covers. He’d freeze. Maybe he’d die of exposure. Well, she wasn’t going to cover him up, but she’d close the window for when she came in. The car keys were in his jacket pocket, mixed up with a lot of loose change. The feel of his warm body through the material made her shiver. His breath smelt of spirits and he was sweating in spite of the cold. Among the change were two five pence pieces. She’d take one of those and keep it till the morning to feed that gas meter. It would be horrible dressing for that wedding in here at zero temperature. Why not feed it now so that it would be ready for the morning, ready to turn the gas fire on and give her some heat when she came in at midnight, come to that?